Storytelling and Stakeholder Engagement: Fortune 500

Your ability to master storytelling and stakeholder engagement best practices will determine whether you reach your business and career goals in our increasingly-disrupted post-COVID future of work.

Yet traditional advice to “go with your gut” in storytelling and stakeholder engagement scenarios so often leads to disasters that devastate company bottom lines and bring down high-flying careers, as revealed by research in behavioral economics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. So what are the best practices used by the leaders of Fortune 500 companies to make the right calls in even the toughest storytelling and stakeholder engagement scenarios to maximize company bottom lines and advance their own careers?

These leaders recognize that science has revealed how our typical approach to storytelling and stakeholder engagement situations suffers from systematic dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases. These mental blindspots often lead us into storytelling and stakeholder engagement disasters that drastically undermine our desired outcomes and goals. Fortunately, recent scholarship has shown effective yet counterintuitive strategies to enable you to defeat these cognitive biases and help optimize your bottom line and your career. In this course, you will learn about and address these dangerous judgment errors, while mastering techniques for all types of storytelling and stakeholder engagement scenarios. You will draw on cutting-edge behavioral science and real-world best practices from Fortune 500 company leaders to help you and your teams reach your professional goals.

After taking this course, you will:

• Master storytelling and stakeholder engagement best practices used by Fortune 500 leaders to seize competitive advantage for their bottom line and career
• Free yourself of constant ruminations, numerous grey zones, and blindspots that plague storytelling and stakeholder engagement skills, blocking your goal achievement
• Develop a plan with specific next steps to adapt for yourself the best practices used by Fortune 500 leaders for storytelling and stakeholder engagement scenarios
• Discover the dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases that lead to storytelling and stakeholder engagement disasters for your business objectives
• Maximize your desired outcomes by defeating cognitive biases via science-based storytelling and stakeholder engagement techniques used by Fortune 500 leaders
• Feel truly confident about whether you made the right call in storytelling and stakeholder engagement scenarios to reach your business and career goals

Sounds too good to be true? These methods were successfully used by Aflac, Applied Materials, Entergy, Honda, IBM, JLL, Reckitt, Wells Fargo, and Xerox to dramatically improve the skills of their top executives, senior VPs, middle managers, and lower-level supervisors in storytelling and stakeholder engagement scenarios. Over the last two decades, I trained the leaders at these Fortune 500 companies, as well as at numerous middle-market companies and quickly-growing startups as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. The secrets used by these companies will be revealed in this course.

Here’s a recent testimonial from John Elnitsky, the head of the nuclear division of Entergy, a company ranked #299 by Fortune, speaking about the impact of my training on the leaders of the nuclear industry:

• “We at Entergy hired Dr. Gleb as the opening keynote speaker to set the tone for the annual nuclear utility industry conference, hoping he would give a wake-up call about the threats and risks facing us and what steps we can take to prepare. Well, what he delivered exceeded our expectations. His keynote was the talk of the conference, widely described by attendees as giving the nuclear industry ‘the kick in the pants we needed to jump-start critically important initiatives to address the threats he outlined.’ Thank you Dr. Gleb!”

Here’s a recent testimonial from Harish Phadke, the Business Manager for the head of the North American Health division at Reckitt, a company ranked #326 by Fortune, about the impact of my training on the Reckitt North American Health Leadership Team:

• “Dr. Gleb Tsipursky provided a truly outstanding virtual training on unconscious bias and future-proofing via emotional and social intelligence for the Reckitt North American Health Leadership Team. Exceeding our expectations, Dr Gleb customized his groundbreaking, behavioral science-driven training content to integrate our initiatives, policies, and case studies at Reckitt, expertly targeting our evolving needs. We are delighted to have met Dr. Gleb, and look forward to future opportunities to keep working with him on a training series for the organization. I highly recommend him for anyone who wants to get a rapid grasp of highly relevant topics which influence human behavior in the prevailing challenging times.”

Besides such real-world, pragmatic expertise, I have a strong academic background as a behavioral scientist studying storytelling, stakeholder engagement, and related fields. I spent 8 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, first getting a PhD in the History of Behavioral Science and then serving as a lecturer there. Then, I spent 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University, where I published dozens of peer-reviewed articles on this topic in high-quality academic journals such as Behavior and Social Issues and Journal of Social and Political Psychology. Thus, this course is thoroughly informed by cutting-edge research.

This combination of business and science led to my expertise gaining global recognition. I published over 550 articles and gave over 450 interviews for prominent venues, such as Fortune, USA Today, CNBC, Fast Company, CBS News, Business Insider, Inc. Magazine, and Time.

My expertise is also featured in my 7 best-selling books, including global best-sellers Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019) and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020). Further attesting to my global renown, my work was translated into Chinese, German, Russian, Korean, Polish, Spanish, French and other languages.

That’s what you can expect in this course: methods used successfully by leaders at the biggest companies to seize competitive advantage for their bottom lines and careers, thoroughly informed by cutting-edge research, and featured in top media venues and best-selling books around the globe. The course will feature the following lessons:

Lesson 1: Storytelling: Introduction and course textbook packet

Learning Objective: Learn what the course will be about and get my best-selling book and other materials on which the course is based

Lesson 2: Storytelling: Preparing for effective stakeholder engagement

Learning Objective: Identify the 8 powerful questions you need to ask in preparing for effective stakeholder engagement

Lesson 3: Storytelling: Addressing bias among your stakeholders

Learning Objective: Discover how to address unconscious bias among your stakeholders to facilitate effective engagement

Lesson 4: Storytelling: How to use empathy to understand your stakeholders

Learning Objective: Master the use of 3 key empathy-based techniques to understand the truth about the perspectives of your stakeholders

Lesson 5: Storytelling: Getting vital info from your stakeholders

Learning Objective: Overcome the challenge of getting negative information about the facts of reality from your stakeholders

Lesson 6: Storytelling: Negotiating with your stakeholders

Learning Objective: Improve your ability to negotiate effectively with your stakeholders

Lesson 7: Storytelling: Build strong stakeholder relationships

Learning Objective: Acquire the social intelligence-based methods necessary to build strong stakeholder relationships

Lesson 8: Storytelling: Facilitate effective stakeholder collaboration

Learning Objective: Facilitate effective collaboration among stakeholders with differing perspectives, personalities, and predispositions

Lesson 9: Storytelling: Address stakeholder risk denialism

Learning Objective: Acquire the skills needed to address risk denialism among your stakeholders

Lesson 10: Storytelling: Lifelong learning for content mastery

Learning Objective: Gain resources for lifelong learning to have content mastery

So why should you take my course rather than someone else’s alternative course? Simply because this course provides unparalleled value. No one else on this platform comes even close to my level of credibility in the course topic:

• As a trainer for Fortune 500 companies
• As a behavioral scientist
• As a best-selling author
• As a globally-renowned thought leader

So if you want an alternative course that doesn’t offer top value and expertise, take someone else’s class. If you want the best, take this course.

Here’s another reason to register now. Once you register, you’ll get access to the core textbook course materials packet, including my best-selling book, a decision aid, and my assessment on dangerous judgment errors, all of which sell for over $25 combined. Fortune 500 companies get this packet for their leadership teams to help them seize competitive advantage in their storytelling and stakeholder engagement skills: you’re getting what they are getting.

This is an intermediate-level course: at least a year of real-world professional experience is required to appreciate the strategies and case studies outlined in the class.

Your registration is risk-free. See the terms and conditions for more.

I look forward to welcoming you into the world of evidence-based, science-driven techniques tested in the real world of many Fortune 500 companies and numerous middle-market companies. To ensure that you master the best practices of Fortune 500 companies to help yourself seize competitive advantage for your bottom line and career in storytelling and stakeholder engagement skills, register now!